Software Development and Self Employment
I’ve just read a couple of interesting articles whilst having my miso soup over lunch:
Both offing good advice about roughly the same thing, but coming from different directions.
"How hard could it be?" offers a blueprint for software failure within a small to medium sized development team so the mistakes aren’t replicated, where as "Process and the mISV" notes some points to developing software when working on your own.
As ibrow is effectively just me most of the time, but also as someone who uses freelancers, both these articles were of interest to me. Whilst most of the issues raised by the two articles, I should already know, it is to be reminded, as sometimes when up to your eyeballs in work it’s difficult to see the wood from the trees. A tip that I’d never thought of, especially if in a development team of one, was holding a Business and Technical review
Hold weekly business and technical reviews When you’re starting a business on your own, it can be hard to see the big picture. Why not devote two hours a week to self-review? Sit down with a pad and a big cup of coffee and ask yourself: What have I done right? What have I done wrong? How do I do better? from Process and the mISVAnother good bit of advice was from Joel’s article:
Mistake No. 2: Set weekly milestones. … [developers] need to draw up detailed plans before they start writing code. … When you ask developers for one, however, many of them will respond by creating a schedule that breaks pieces of the process into weeks. This may seem perfectly reasonable, but it’s not. If you let a software team submit a schedule with big chunky estimates of time (by big I mean more than two days of work), you can be almost certain that they’re not considering every detail that needs to be implemented, and those details will add up to a huge delay. from How hard could it be?
As a self employed developer, it is often far too easy to get wrapped up in the "must do this now" and "so much work todo" mentality, without thinking about the larger goals. Certainly spending a couple of hours each week away from the computer, have a coffee and really plan what the important things are, both this week, and beyond would be beneficial to both me and my business. I think it was Seth Godin who said (paraphrasing now, I have his "Small is the New Big" book) "do the important things first.".
Well, I think the moral is to work out what the important things are, but not just work orientated.
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February 14th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Bad Credit Loan for Self Employed - For the Cause of Serving Self Employed
Alternatively, the loans lent to the self employed people are unreasonably termed, with the intention that borrowers will